Small Sacrifices

Death at scale began in the steamy Yucatán. Long before the apocalypses of our own age, great lizards roared in futile pain. A snaking comet, ten miles wide, punched a wound ten times as large again into the side of the peninsula, sixty million years before even our oldest, ape-like ancestors stared, frightened, into the dark.

In the ash and cloud that covered the sun, something dark and infinite sucked itself into existence in the deep sinkholes beneath the earth’s shattered crust. Breathing steamy poison into the cenotes that pocked the plagued landscape, it swallowed anything unfortunate enough to stray or fall into its geologic sarracenia.

Over the millennia, our primate minds sought to allay death’s endless hunger. Necropoles of skull piles and serpent pyramids grew to surround the crater mouths, offer rivers of blood, and leech the cloudy waters. More and more unwilling victims tied and thrown to feed the inky beast. Then came the Spanish with their sacrificial god who ate the gold and killed all who would not yield. Their priests blessed the new sacred waters and the great worm coiled, open-mouthed and waiting, in the ever present depths.